Software development

Software development

KDE Plasma has won me over. It's gorgeous, smooth, fast, and as stable as any desktop on the market. On top of all that, it has features that other desktops only dream of, including KDE Activities, KRunner, Window Rules, and KDE Connect.

When a security update cannot install because the operating system misjudges the state of its own boot partition, the problem isn't only storage. The real problem is trust in the update process. This is a basic hygiene failure dressed up as a technical issue. An update that cannot reliably detect available space on the EFI System Partition is not a small miss. It is a reminder that even mature platforms still struggle with dependency awareness and pre-flight validation.

Miller's employer shut down those VMs at the end of the working day to free up resources for overnight jobs. He therefore wrote a cleanup routine that removed the drives and backed up their contents. This story took place in 1981, a time when it was possible for code written by a 21-year-old to go into production without much scrutiny.

“People wanted to see more pro-code flexibility,” he said in an interview at Sapphire 2026. “We had gone with a low-code approach. You could give it extension points and tools, but you couldn't touch the core of it. Now you can build a custom agent, connect it to your own GitHub.”

I worked at a startup at the time, our team used this ancient bug tracker. May have been Bugzilla. The point being that tool was not particularly configurable. You either got notifications or you did not get notifications. If you configure for notifications, you got notifications. You touch a bug, you get an email. Somebody touches a bug, they get an email. Somebody else touches a bug, you get 10 emails. Get the idea. The team decided, this is not tenable. We need a concise daily report that shows you the life of our bugs for the day.

“Aided by the efforts of the Reproducible Builds project, we've decided it's time to say that Debian must ship reproducible packages,” wrote ReleaseTeam member Paul Gevers. “Since yesterday, we have enabled our migration software to block migration of new packages that can't be reproduced or existing packages (in testing) that regress in reproducibility.”